


Kirin Jindosh Was Afraid of Cats

by volpeanon



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, baby kirin, but some gore, discovering his passions, dissection of an already dead animal, much to the grief of everyone else, no animal killing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-09
Updated: 2020-04-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:21:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23559787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volpeanon/pseuds/volpeanon
Summary: “His mother asked: Why did you do that to the cat? Young Kirin only wanted to know what was inside; how it worked. Her distress puzzled him."
Comments: 1
Kudos: 18





	Kirin Jindosh Was Afraid of Cats

Kirin hadn’t always been scared of cats.

In Karnaca, as anywhere, there was an abundance of felines. They slunk about the docks and stole whatever they could drag away before they were got with stones, they hissed from windowsills, they leered in alleyways – and woe betide the ankles of any that got too close. Everybody learnt to be wary of them from a young age, and Kirin was hardly a slow learner, but he wasn’t truly afraid of them until the day the kitten came up to him. He would have left it alone, but it was so eager and small - mewling at him in a voice he’d never heard from a cat before. He tried to copy what people did with a cat that was theirs, awkwardly flattening his hand on the top of its head. After a few false starts – when it squirmed, and he leapt back, and it wobbled resolutely after him, wailing – he found that all it wanted to do was rub its cheek on his fingers. Its dark fur was soft; he felt the warm, damp little puffs of its breath on his skin; when he knelt on the cobbles and put his ear to it to hear it purr, it rubbed its cheek all over his face, its whiskers making him giggle.

The first he knew of the mother was when she had clawed him shoulder to elbow and bitten him in the neck.

He didn’t play with kittens after that. When he saw cats lounging in doorways he refused to go past. He woke up half the street screaming the night he found one on his windowsill.

It was sometime later that he acquired his first book – paid for with his own coins, earnt from kindly neighbours that humoured him and let him fix their odds and ends. It was a memoir of a man’s time at the Academy of Natural Philosophy, and while Kirin poured over every word of every paragraph, and committed the entire thing to memory, one part in particular struck him. The author described his fear of the hagfish, and how he had cured it by studying them.  _ The enemy of fear is understanding, _ he wrote,  _ and now having dissected one of the villainous creatures, I rest easy upon the waves for I understand their mechanisms and know them to be merely another fish. _

Kirin didn’t know what dissection was then. He snuck into two different bookshops to find out, hiding under tables with thick, embossed tomes on the floor with him. He poured over illustrations, diagrams, every word of every description he could find. Then he stole three blades: a filleting knife, from a café that didn’t shut its back door; a butcher’s knife, unattended at the docks; and a small hand-saw, also unattended, beside a whale carcass half-carved up on the ramps.

The specimen wasn’t hard to get, although hunting through places he knew cats might haunt was nerve-wracking. He only spent a week turning over piles of boxes in alleyways and looking under bushes before he found the battered old thing under an abandoned chair, stiff and cold but not too awful to smell. He took it home wrapped in one of his father’s shirts. On the kitchen table, standing on a chair to reach, he laid the cat out, propped his book open against the wall before him, and started to cut.

It was like an awakening for him. The soft, easy glide of the sharp filleting knife through sinew; unfurling the flesh to reveal secrets, treasures, hidden beneath; the thick, viscous blood that slopped lazily from his incisions; the thrill of realising that, within, creatures were just like the boat engines his mother had shown him the workings of. Inside, they were machines, with a thousand delicate parts balanced precariously and performing their own tasks. Kirin Jindosh had been an engineer from the moment his mother, watching him sitting on the floor, almost a year old, and gazing up at a clock on its shelf, had lifted him to let him touch it and said playfully ‘tick, tock, tick, tock’ – and Kirin, his pale gaze piercing and solemn, had asked ‘how?’. But he became more the moment he felt something deeply satisfying in the secret interior of a living being - the parts not meant to come to light - and all the knowledge to be had from them. Creatures, human and otherwise, were confusing, unpredictable things to him. It was immensely comforting to find somewhere where they made sense.

But then his mother came home. 

He didn’t see the way she froze in the door, her face gone ashen, her eyes wide. He was too excited – he wanted to show her what he’d done. She rarely understood the things he told her, knowledge gleaned or thoughts had, but she always listened. Not with the cat, though. “Why did you do that to it?” she asked as he led her over to his work. He opened his mouth to reply, she asked again before he could even speak "Why did you _do_ that to it?"

He pulled his heavy book from the table, struggling to hold it open at the right page im his skinny arms. "In my book it says-" his mother was picking up one of the knives, setting it down like it was made of glass "Mama look, see in my book-" she cast around, grabbed a shirt that was waiting to be mended on a chair, put it over the corpse "In my book it says, 'the enemy of fear is understanding'- mama you're not looking-"

She told him, terse in a way he’d never heard before, to sit in his room for a little while. He watched her bundle everything, the knives too, into the shirt. He opened his mouth and she snapped _"Now,_ Kirin!" so he fled. With the door cracked open he watched her clean. She buried everything in the bin out the back of the building. She looked at his notes for a long time, running the hand with only four fingers through her hair again and again. Then she put them in the furnace. Kirin bit his lip and, as quietly as he could, hid his book. He didn’t understand. He thought he’d done it well, just like in the pictures, all neat – he’d even managed to peel most of the skin back intact. Why did she want to get rid of it, of his notes, when she kept all his drawings? She didn’t want to hear about what he’d learnt when she let him come out for dinner. 

"Never speak about this," her voice was quiet, her eyes avoided his "Not to anyone. _Never_ do it again, understand? Never."

His pushed his food nervously around on his plate and asked in a very small voice "Why?"

"People don't do that. Don't speak of it."

The people in his book did it, but he didn't dare say so. He was afraid of this gaunt, unsmiling vision of his soft-faced mother.

But unfortunately, if there was ever a way to get Kirin to do something, it was to tell him not to without any good reason.


End file.
